The speed and the size of computer assemblies is growing at a rapid rate. There is foreseen further increases in the number of parallel processing elements and circuitry and larger and larger computer assemblies requiring faster and faster processing speeds. This is particularly true in supercomputer designs. The circuits are often placed on a circuit board or card and several of these cards are mounted to frames. There are interconnections between cards on a frame and there is frequently a need to make interconnection by cables between the cards or boards on one frame to cards or boards on other frames. The distances involved however with such high speed circuitry can themselves cause significant delay and it is highly desirable to find a manner in which the circuit boards can be closely packed and the interconnection lengths minimized. It is further desirable that these lengths be equalized to prevent skewing errors.
In a typical prior art circuit assembly, circuit modules such as IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) TCMs (Temperature Control Modules) are solder connected to rectangular printed circuit cards. The input/output connections to the circuitry of each card are brought out to printed circuit lines at the edge of the card. A large number of the cards are inserted into electrical connectors on a large printed circuit board sometimes referred to as a "motherboard". In a typical prior art circuit assembly the circuit elements are mounted on the printed cards which are themselves mounted on a larger printed circuit board which provides electrical interconnection between the circuit cards.
Conventional packaging techniques place the component mounting boards parallel to the long axis of the frame as shown in FIG. 1. The boards are packaged within the frame using this concept are separated by one another by the width of the frame. Therefore communication between these boards is increased by the width of the center frame as shown in FIG. 1.